In Profile Theater’s Passion Play, Subverting the Strange History of Morality …

• David Kinder
• Profile Theater’s Passion Play, produced in collaboration with Shaking the Tree

Playwright Sarah Ruhl began writing the first two parts of her theater cycle Passion Play after reading about the Bavarian village of Oberammergau in the early 1900s, where actors who played Christ and the Virgin Mary in their annual Passion play were supposedly as holy in real life as they were on stage.

In her introduction to the play, Ruhl writes, “I started thinking, how would it shape or misshape a life to play a biblical role year after year? How are we scripted? Where is the line between authentic identity and performance? And is there, in fact, such a line?”

This past week’s run of these first two parts of Passion Play are part of Profile Theater’s year-long exploration of Ruhl, a playwright known for her use of poetic language and nontraditional narrative structures.

In the first part of Passion Play‘s cycle, we’re brought to a 16th-century English village still putting on the annual Passion play after others had stopped or been forced to stop. Here questions of identity and performance are at the forefront: The actor playing Christ has an enlarged sense of self and piousness from his role, Pontius Pilate is convinced his lot in life would change if he could play Christ instead, and the Virgin Mary is trying

Article source: http://www.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2015/09/18/in-profile-theaters-passion-play-subverting-the-strange-history-of-morality-plays